A Private Venus (23 page)

She almost didn’t feel the cut, nor did any blood run down her face, because he scrupulously dabbed the wound with the peroxide while the photographer left her head free for a moment.

‘If you have anything new to tell me, nod your head and I’ll take out the cotton wool, but if you’re going to tell me again that you don’t know anything, then forget it, I’ll only get angry.’

Maybe that noise was only in her mind, an auditory hallucination which she heard because of her hope that the noise was real, but she instinctively turned her head towards the door because she had heard the sound of the bell.

‘Did someone just ring?’ the man asked.

‘No,’ the photographer said. ‘She must be waiting for somebody, and she thought they rang.’

The man reflected, with the penknife in his hand, so close to her face that she could see it was a promotional object and read on the handle the name of a famous brand of liqueurs. ‘If she was expecting someone, they’d be here by now, so try to keep calm. This girl knows where the film from last year is, maybe she even has it, and she’ll tell us eventually.’ He rubbed her left cheek with the alcohol. ‘If you talk,’ he said to her, ‘you’ll avoid a cut on your cheek which no amount of plastic surgery will put right.’ He looked at her and waited, then made the incision, his eyes almost closed behind his glasses, staring at her cheek like a diligent schoolboy at the page of an exercise book on which he’s carefully writing a beautiful sentence. ‘Whatever you know, you can’t use it against us anyway. Tell your friends, if you have any, but if you talk I’ll stop here.’ He started dabbing the cut with the peroxide, but it wasn’t enough, rivulets of blood started falling onto her neck, her chest, all the way to her stomach. ‘Will you talk or shall I continue?’

First they saw Livia’s taxi pull up. Even without the little telescope he had a good view of his Livia getting out in front of the stark, imposing temple of construction, but he used the telescope anyway to look at her more closely. He very much liked the dark red cotton dress she was wearing, she had good taste in clothes, her simplicity was so calculated, it was almost irritating. Then Livia was swallowed up by that deity of concrete and the taxi driver angrily headed back towards the heedless, sleeping metropolis. It was a few minutes after two, her punctuality was also irritating.

Their observation point was under the arbour, which rested against the roof of a tiny ramshackle house, like those you found in magazines for little children. Around the house and the arbour there were trees with bright, tiny leaves that created an ideal barrier, because from the outside you couldn’t see anything and from inside you could see everything. Inside the house there was a fat young man sleeping with his head propped on the table. They had given him five thousand lire and this had relaxed him completely and had removed any curiosity he might have had. There was a side road, about a hundred metres long, joining the little house to the main road, the Giulietta was parked with its front towards the main road, in the shelter of the trees, and they were leaning on the trunk of the Giulietta in the relatively cool shade, watching.

‘Has she gone in?’ Davide asked.

‘Yes.’ Duca handed him the telescope. But now there was
nothing to be seen except the sky-grey tower in the green sea of fields and, in the background, Milan in the summer haze. It would have made a nice picture postcard, photographed from here, they could have offered it to the owners of the Ulisse Apartments.

A lorry passed, a moped passed, then nothing: the desert. Then Davide said, ‘I think someone is about to stop outside the building.’

‘What?’ But he had already seen it: a Mercedes 230 had appeared from the end of the street and was now slowing down in front of the building then entering the scorching concrete parking area and very slowly parking between the white lines.

Davide was still looking through the telescope. ‘I’ve seen that car before, the same model, the same colour, it must be the same, there aren’t many Mercedes 230s around and it’s unusual for two of them to have the same colour.’

‘Where did you see it?’ Now a man was slowly getting out, he looked young, though rather large, and seemed to be in absolutely no hurry.

Davide’s voice was anxious. ‘Last year, that day with Alberta.’

‘Give me the telescope.’ He looked through it at the young man, and saw him as if he was only about five metres away. To many he might have seemed the model of the good son, but to Duca, a doctor and psychologist despite everything, he didn’t. That was the worst kind of criminal face there was, the kind that didn’t arouse suspicion.

‘On the autostrada, I saw it a couple of times before we
got to Somaglia, then when I came back towards Milan and Alberta was crying, it was still behind us. At Metanopoli I overtook it and it seemed as if it was going to stop.’ Even after a year, the memory was still vivid, everything connected with Alberta was vivid in his mind. He now realised what that car had meant, a year earlier, and what it meant now.

Duca, too, had understood. ‘He really looks like a killer,’ he said, putting the telescope down on the trunk of the Giulietta. There was nothing else to see, the killer had entered the building, the Mercedes was baking in the sun.

‘What should we do?’ Davide asked, he seemed to have turned green, but it wasn’t because of the reflection of the leaves in the arbour.

There was almost nothing they could do. Everything was clear. The distinguished-looking gentleman with the grey moustache seduced restless girls from the city, someone professional photographed them, and this man in the Mercedes kept an eye on them and punished those who rebelled or tried to get away or had the idea of betraying them. In addition, the photographs were hot. For a photograph, these people were prepared to kill one, two, ten women.

‘We have to go in there now,’ Davide said.

Yes, of course, they had to get going immediately: the man who had overpowered Alberta and slashed her wrists, who had taken Maurilia to Rome and drowned her in the Tiber, would also kill Livia Ussaro at the slightest suspicion.

‘We have to stay here,’ Duca said. He had the feeling he was also becoming green, at least the skin of his face felt as if it must be green.

‘But that’s the man who killed Alberta, he was following us the whole time.’

‘Yes, that’s him. But if we go in now, once we’ve knocked down the front door of the building and then the door of the apartment, he can kill Livia if he wants to, he has all the time in the world.’ It was a simple and unfortunate situation, he explained, the only hope was that the man didn’t suspect Livia, that he allowed her to pose for the photographs and then let her go, one of the many girls who must have passed that way. And there was no reason for him to suspect her: Livia hadn’t met anyone after seeing Signor A, she had done nothing suspicious, she had left home and had come here to pose for photographs. Livia was clever, she knew what to do. Besides, if these people had had the slightest suspicion, they wouldn’t even have got this far and stepped into a trap, they would have simply disappeared. They were on the lookout, but they didn’t suspect. If they went up there to save Livia, they would simply kill her, because they would be revealing who she was. The best way to save her was to stay here, and wait for her to come out.

‘And what if she doesn’t come out?’

Young Davide’s anxiety was making him nervous, he at least was hiding his own. ‘They can’t stay in there forever. Either they don’t suspect anything, they photograph her and then let her go, or else they discover something and they’ll try to escape.’

‘And Livia?’

Enough now, he was also thinking of Livia, or maybe he was praying, rather than thinking. He didn’t reply.

There are sixty minutes in an hour and they were passing one by one. The young man asleep in the little house from the kids’ magazine woke up at the sound of a tractor passing on the main road, looked at the world outside, the Giulietta and the two men who were part of that world, then must have remembered the five thousand lire and lit a cigarette and probably started to think about the way he would spend it. It was no later than 2:25, it was just a matter of knowing how long it took a photographer to expose a complete roll of Minox film. He had no idea, it depended partly on the model, but he assumed it couldn’t be less than half an hour.

Davide knew he shouldn’t speak, but there was a limit. ‘We can’t just stay here and wait.’

‘No,’ Duca said, looking at his watch, almost exactly half an hour had passed since Livia had got out of the taxi. ‘No, that’s exactly what we have to do.’

And then something happened. They saw two men come out of the Ulisse Apartments and one of the two was the man from the Mercedes, who now seemed to be in a bit of a hurry, he was nowhere near as relaxed as he had been before, and, for not more than a thousandth of a second, they waited to see Livia, too, come out of that Aztec temple, but the two men were alone and had almost reached the Mercedes, and it really looked as if they were making a quick getaway.

‘Try to cut them off,’ he said to Davide. They had the disadvantage that they were nearly three hundred metres from the building, but the advantage that their car was ready, with its doors open, and they didn’t have to do anything but start
the engine. The other men were only now opening the doors of their car.

And in the time that took them, Davide set off, ate up the path, swallowed the two hundred metres of main road that separated them and aimed straight at the front of the Mercedes, practically determined to crash into it.

The Mercedes set off furiously: the road to Milan was near, and there they’d be able to lose themselves in the traffic. They rushed onto the main road towards Melzo, while Davide lost a few seconds reversing in order to point the car in the right direction. The man at the wheel of the Mercedes seemed to be very confident of the almost empty road, he still had three hundred metres advantage, he was moving straight ahead like a plane, and Duca then said something stupid to Davide: ‘Even if we don’t catch them, don’t worry, we’ll catch them later.’

‘I’ve already got them,’ Davide said. He was more than confident, he was blind with fury; as if the car ahead of them was a moped, he was suddenly on top of it, another second and he would overtake it.

‘Watch out, they may turn off,’ Duca said. He should also have said, watch out, they may open fire, but he didn’t: if they opened fire they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

The Mercedes did turn off, in fact, in order to avoid being boxed in on the main road, they must be intending to jump out and set off at a run across the fields, and if they did that it meant they weren’t armed, and if they weren’t armed they were dead, because the road they had been forced to turn
onto was a mere hundred metres long and ended up in front of a big farmhouse.

Hens flew up into the air, a dog tied to a long chain howled and tried to fly, too, a countrywoman in shorts, bra, and straw hat stood there petrified with a kind of pitchfork in her hand when she saw the two cars explode in front of her, and they really did explode rather than just brake. The four doors of the two cars opened simultaneously, but Duca and Davide were faster on their feet, Duca grabbed the man, the sadist, before he had taken more than a few steps and before he realised that he had been caught, he gave him a kick in the stomach which laid him out flat in the dust in front of the farmhouse, howling and abject.

Davide had taken the other man and was holding him by one arm, without doing anything to him, because he was good, but the photographer was screaming hysterically, ‘Help, help!’ and it wasn’t as stupid as it might seem to cry for help: if he managed to create confusion, if he could make the people here believe, if only for a minute, that he was an honest citizen being attacked, he might be able to get away.

Then Duca left the sadist moaning on the ground, unable to get up—if he hadn’t smashed his stomach in it was pure chance, because that had been his intention—and passed on to the other man: he didn’t yet know that he was a homosexual, but the way he was screaming aroused his suspicions and when he saw him up close his suspicions were confirmed.

‘Look down, you bastard,’ he said.

This unexpected request made the photographer fall silent for a moment, then he raised his head a little more and
screamed even more loudly, ‘Help!’ That was all Duca needed: he hit him on his Adam’s apple. Not even as a doctor had he ever been curious to know what happened to an Adam’s apple if you hit it like that, for a moment all that happened was that the photographer fell abruptly silent and collapsed against Davide.

‘Police,’ Duca said.

A robust old countryman had suddenly appeared. Duca flashed his medical registration card at him: he was a romantic, he still kept it in his wallet.

‘These two are murderers, they’ve killed two women, is there anywhere we can keep them locked up?’

Then a young man came out, then an old lady, then two boys. They weren’t quite sure what was going on, but they all recognised the word ‘police.’

‘The stable,’ the old man said.

‘The stable will be fine.’

There was only an old carthorse there, it really was a stable, not one of those gleaming air-conditioned hostels you saw on television. They threw the two men down in the mire, one of them was moaning with his hands on his stomach, conscious but powerless to do anything, the other had fainted, or had he choked to death? Duca didn’t think it was urgent to find out.

‘Davide, go back to the Ulisse Apartments, find Livia, see what’s happening, then phone Carrua, tell him everything and ask him to come here immediately.’ This was urgent, Livia was urgent. ‘In the meantime I’ll talk to these two. Go.’

It isn’t all that hot in a stable, in summer the smell is
stronger than the heat. The light came from two round holes high in the walls, but it was sufficient. Once he had heard Davide drive off, he forbade himself to think about anything apart from the two men. He stood in front of the one who was holding his hands on his stomach and had stopped moaning: his fear was greater than his pain.